Frank had looked for no more than an instant when a strength like that of a shire horse hauled him backwards, bent him like a bow. His spine curved, complaining, while his feet kicked out to stop himself being folded in half. Alaya’s small hand held tight and cold to his collar, her knuckles against the nape of his neck, and her pretty little face upside down to his, wide-eyed and disappointed. “All of that healing, Frank, for such poor sport? I did not expect you to be caught so easily.”
She lowered her mouth as if to kiss him on the forehead again. No smell of breath came from her, but this close the clay-cold reek of sodden soil was all but choking. He got one hand behind his own neck and batted at her grip, as ineffectually as if she were made of steel. With the other he tried to fend her mouth off, succeeded only in getting her two long fangs—close together in the front of her jaw like the incisors of rats—wedged in the heel of his hand.
It was not a great pain, but it made him go cold. She leaned farther forward, and the teeth drove through between his bones, emerged from the other side of his hand. She put out a long pink tongue and lapped at the blood.
Frank shouted “Argh!” more in disgust and outrage than in pain, just as behind him another voice shouted “No!” and Radu Văcărescu hurled himself into his mother like the captain of a village football team trying to wrestle his opponent to the ground.
It should have been ridiculous—he was three times broader than her and almost twice the height. But she stopped him like a brick wall. Frank thought he even heard bones breaking. She took one step back, her teeth sliding out from Frank’s palm like saw blades, and in a curiously delicate version of Radu’s own dismissive backhand, she slapped him across the face. The blow lifted Radu off his feet and flung him backwards into a beautifully painted globe of the world that stood by the bookshelf. His spine met the polished wood with a splintering sound, and he sat in the wreckage just long enough, shaking his head as if to try to settle his brains, for Frank to be terrified she had broken him too.
For a flickering second it seemed Alaya was also worried: she paused in her attack, waited until Radu began trying to struggle to his feet.
Frank, pressing down on the puncture wounds, blood hot and slippery between his fingers, took the chance of her distraction to run to his host’s side as though he would be safe there.
His instincts played him false—the position just made it easier for Alaya to sweep up to them both, grab Frank by the throat, and push his head back with her other hand, baring the great vein in his neck. He didn’t think he was scared. Didn’t think he was in his right mind enough to have any true emotion, but he whimpered nevertheless and kicked her hard in the legs, kneed her in the stomach.
“No!” yelled Radu again, weaving on his feet a little, wincing as he forced himself to stand. “Let him go. He’s mine.” He drew his sword, a long line of silver in the brown room, the blade whispering against the metal lip of his scabbard. His expression was terrified, but his hand was steady.
Yes! Frank thought, exulting at the fact that Alaya could not simply force Radu to do what she wanted him to do. By the malevolent concentration on her face, she was certainly trying. Cut her head right off.
But as Radu pulled his hand back for the blow, he hesitated. A mist coalesced behind him into the form of Constantin, who wrapped his iron fingers around his descendant’s wrist and stopped him like shackles.
Hand in Frank’s hair, Alaya bent him all but double, lowering his throat to her mouth. Radu cursed and punched Constantin in the mouth with the basket hilt of his sabre. The flesh split there but did not bleed, white and dry as bread dough, and Constantin slapped him in return, making his teeth rattle, turning the whole of one cheek red as a graze.
Alaya’s lips were cold on Frank’s neck, not like a kiss at all, but like a physician’s cupping glass, narrow and tightly sealed. Frank’s scatter of panicked emotions merged suddenly in one great wail of denial. He didn’t want to die. Not at all. But especially not like this.
Istanbul
The jellyfish tried to skirt Zayd’s fingers, but he was too fast for them. When pinched between finger and thumb, they felt a little like cold sliced chicken—the same yielding firmness as muscle. But if so, it was muscle made of glass, for he could see perfectly from one side to the next. Sometimes the fluttering edge would pull itself out of his grasp, and he would know the thing was alive, aware of him in some way.
They were far too slippery to pick up by hand. Letting go, he sat up to grab his net, then leaned down once more over the boat’s bow to peer down into the black water. At first he saw only the reflection of the boat’s blue eye on the mirrored surface of the Bosphorus, then his own brown eyes staring back at him quizzically. After which, his gaze slipped again beneath the surface of the water and penetrated its depths, letting him return to the contemplation of the thousands upon thousands of jellyfish which drifted, like flowers made of evanescent light, up from the deep to sun themselves in the warm shallows around the passing ships.
They seemed to have no eyes, no brain, unless the central tangle of pink, fleshy stuff contained both, contained their hearts too and their mouths. Yet they were conscious, somehow, else how would they know to try to avoid his fingers?
Sunlight beat on his back, welcome and soothing, though the stink of fish it drew from his hired boat made him want to put his head into the sea and breathe silver water like his prey. He leaned out into a bloom of them instead and scooped them up in the net. Out of the water they seemed even less alive, unable to support their own weight, flattened into disks of mucus as if spat onto the harbour’s roads.
He transferred them to a bucket of seawater, where they billowed out once more into their true shapes. Here, when examined at close quarters, they no longer seemed luminous, more simply pale, the faint pink and green and blue lights that he had thought swirled around their domed heads either drowned out by the sun, or a product of his own wishful thinking. Disappointing.
Shading the bucket brought out glimmers of radiance again. Uncricking his stiff neck, he lifted them into the shadow of the red, triangular sail, covered them with the tail of his caftan, and again saw fugitive lights. But no organ that seemed to produce them. Nor any difference in the texture of the creature’s hide at those points where they were brightest.
“Zayd, effendi. What under the heavens are you doing?”
He glanced up to find the boat’s owner, tiller in one hand, loose end of the sail in the other, nudging the bucket with his bare foot. Settling back on his haunches, Zayd considered the question. He must indeed seem very foolish. “It is surely a creature of uncanny abilities,” he said at last, ignoring the ferryman’s sceptical smile. “I know they do nothing but float like a type of water lily, but they are aware, and they have this light about them which they generate somehow. I wanted to see if it was an ink, like the ink of octopuses, which is not at all magical, or if it was something more marvellous and rare.”
The ferryman pushed two fingers under his cap and scratched his head. “You wanted it for your charms?”
He didn’t look like a clever fellow, with most of his front teeth missing and those that were left stained brown from coffee and the narghile. He was in truth as wizened and as dried up as a smoked swordfish, but Zayd was still impressed. “That’s right. How much better to write charms against the darkness of the evil one than using ink that is itself brimming with magical light? I’m sorry, but I see so many people, did you . . .?”
“My nephew came to see you, this time last year, for a word that would keep the cats from our storeroom.”
Zayd smiled and wondered if he should ask Did it work? But putting a question in his clients’ minds about the efficacy of the remedies often led to them failing. Faith clearly played an element in the magic. Nor was there any real reason to doubt his charms. He might have no talent himself—something he kept as carefully hidden as the truth that it was in fact his mother’s blessing that lay on the parchment squares—but he copie
d out the formulae exactly from the books of many well-regarded sages. If it worked for them, there was no reason to doubt it should work for him too.
“Nevzad Ibn Ahmed,” he said instead. “I remember him. He paid in anchovies. My family dined well that night.”
“It would be pretty, at least,” said the old sailor, still without hinting whether the charm had been worth its price, “if you could write in a blue like that—so pale you would think it was burning salt.”
“It would,” Zayd agreed. He would have to take the bucket home and spend hours cutting up the creatures to find out if the colours could be harvested. If the operation itself required magic, his mother and his aunt might be needed to help. “Well, I think no more will fit in here, so I am done.”
But the ferryman was no longer attending him. “What . . .?” he exclaimed under his breath, catching the wind in his sail, slewing round the tiny boat so he could peer out to sea.
I don’t know. What? Zayd disentangled his outer coat from shadowing the jellyfish. Following the old man’s gaze, he watched a massive ship sail round Seraglio point, turn itself from a mountain of white cloud above a shadow, into a shape that disquieted him.
The great vessel came surging up through the black water, over the floating white blooms of the jellyfish, throwing plumes of white foam to either side of its blind prow. Its hull was black and eyeless, except for the impious carving of a half-naked woman on its bow. The representation of a human being, and one so dishonoured—her gilded hair unveiled, one bosom barely concealed beneath carved fabric, one not concealed at all—struck him as obscene. People who could put such a thing as decoration on their ship must have no respect either for women or for themselves.
Behind the painted houri, the shape of the tarred hull swept back in strange lines. A row of cannons protruded their open mouths from gun ports visible in the sides, and a second row bristled on the deck above them, where pale men—in fitted clothes that indecently displayed their forms—clustered about the ammunition like chicks clustering around their hens.
Above the silvery decks, the yards of the ship were festooned with men, and the full spread of white sail that was driving her fast into Istanbul harbour was rapidly, efficiently, being taken up and bound in long cords. Infidels, thought Zayd, uneasily. French or English or Dutch, perhaps, whose newly sprung cultures had barely wiped off the blood of the crusades before they were back, trying to spread their devilry to the civilised world. “What could they want here with a battleship?”
The ship hoisted the British flag as it dropped its anchor, drifted to a gentle halt just inside the hook of the straits, halfway between Topkapi and the mosque of Süleyman. Zayd and his boat were just a little farther in, due south of the Galata Tower, and a man in a tight blue coat and a hat that gleamed with gold leaned over the side and beckoned to him, shouting something that was probably not as unmannerly as it sounded in his language that was like the muttering of icy djinn in the distant north.
Reluctantly, Zayd stood up straight, brushed down his kaftan and cebken, and yelled back, “I’m sorry, I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
A second man joined the first by the rail, this one half-naked and apparently unconcerned by the fact. He had the olive colouring and clever eyes of a Greek. “He said, ‘We British ship Inconstant. Want to talk—”
“Zayd, effendi,” his ferryman interrupted him with a fierce nod to the shore. “Kneel. The sultan comes.”
Indeed, it was almost the time of worship, and in age-old tradition, untroubled by the arrivals at the port, the five caïques that formed the honour guard of the sultan were pushing off from their landings in the palace grounds. Ahead of them the golden oars of the sultan’s caïque beat like falcon wings. As he had done since time immemorial, the Lord of the Horizons was going to prayer at the Suleymaniye.
Forty oarsmen dressed in white speeded his sacred person over the black waters of the Bosphorus in a white caïque that flew like an arrow. Its clean, snowy sides were striped with green like a billion emeralds. The sultan himself sat on a golden chair at the stern and trusted that no one would dare to look straight at his magnificence. Behind him, but ahead of the four guard boats, there came a second caïque just a little less grand, with the imperial standard bearer in the seat of honour, carrying the sultan’s turban.
It was to the turban that Zayd bowed, the sultan himself being too numinous to look upon, except as if by accident from the corner of his eye.
All the movement of the harbour ceased as men in the boats and on the shore bowed to the symbol of the shadow of God on Earth. A hush fell as if over all the world.
In that hush there came a grumbling of wooden wheels and a faint hiss. And then, treacherously, unthinkably, the British ship opened fire. Her whole dark side erupted in tongues of flame and plumes of white smoke and a moment later thunder roared across the peaceful harbour. Boys crabbing from the harbour walls screamed and leaped into the water. Fishermen jumped overboard to safety, or cowered, covering their heads to protect them from the rain of fiery debris. Ashes and sparks spat from the guns’ mouths like curses.
Zayd’s heart stopped beating, his mind went perfectly blank as he waited for cannonballs to smash into the little fleet of caïques, tear them into splinters and rags of flesh. Instead, the guns trundled back. They fired again. Again, flame and noise, and this time a wad of burning fabric the size of a clenched fist burst from one, struck the imperial turban, set it alight and knocked it into the waves.
He watched it unravel beneath the water into a long white ribbon, the diamonds in its sarpech twinkling forlornly as they sank. The foreign ship had shot down the symbol of his nation’s glory, and despite his mind’s attempts to point out that the cannons had not been loaded, that it must have been meant as a salute of honour, his heart was insulted and appalled. When the sultan stood up in the stern of his caïque, drew his scimitar, and declared war, Zayd joined in cheering with all the fervour of a warrior challenged. Accidental or not, such an insult could not be born without consequences.
Zayd was torn between a desire to stay and see what happened next, and a desire to get out of a harbour rapidly filling up with armed warships as Istanbul’s navy mobilized to chase off the threat. The ferryman’s priorities, however, were clear. He whipped the sail around, braced himself against the tiller, and raced before the wind straight up the estuary, out of the potential conflict, into the Golden Horn.
It was no more than ten minutes later they landed on shore, but Zayd’s blood had already begun to cool. He was, on reflection, glad he had been whisked away from potential danger and put down but an hour’s walk from home. Glad enough to give the boatman twice the agreed fee and to ask him to come back next week to repeat the trip.
After prayers, Zayd hefted the bucket by the rope handles and began to walk uphill, through the narrow, but prosperous streets of his neighbourhood. It was pavement here, pale stone that mimicked marble, the closed-up facades of waterfront houses casting welcome shade on the streets. He made it a slow journey, stopping at his barber’s, the baths, the storyteller’s niche in the marketplace, and at the house of the Bektashi order to tell everyone he knew that war had come, bringing risk and spoils and triumph—new slaves, new lands, new converts for a city that had become perhaps a little staid.
At the baker’s counter he stopped again, set down his burden, and waited. A towel had been flung over the bread and cakes, and the baker’s chair was empty, but a glass of tea sat on the stones beside it, still steaming. Clearly he was due back at any moment.
Hearing voices, Zayd slid his bucket under one of the cloths and went round to investigate, and there was the shopkeeper, leaning against the pierced stonework window of a rich merchant’s house, exchanging the time of day with the beggar whose pitch this had been since Zayd had first ventured into the world as a nervous schoolboy of seven years old.
“Peace be upon you,” he said to them both, and was struck by the irony of it. “But perhaps I
shouldn’t say that, for I’ve come to tell you that we are at war.”
“No!” The baker was fat enough to be a good advertisement for his wares—a man who enjoyed his own food. He had flour smudges all over his loosely wrapped turban, and smears of bright saffron on the apron tied over his wide white trousers. The saffron went nicely with the bright green of his sash, but drew attention to his odd, ill-omened bluish eyes.
His life seemed to be spent making up for the evil eyes nature had bestowed on him—here he was, delivering freshly baked flatbread to his local beggar. The beggar leaned back on his wheeled platform, contemplated the stumps of his legs with a grin, and did not trouble to look anything but pleased that war had left him behind a long time ago.
“Yes. I saw it myself, in the harbour. A treacherous attack on the sultan by—” Zayd stopped himself. The long climb had finally taken his edge off and now he was becoming uneasy about his own zeal. Whatever he felt about the indignity, the humiliation, it was true that what had happened had been an attempt to give honour—an attempt that had gone disastrously wrong. “Actually, I am premature. The sultan declared war on the British, but it’s possible that when he has had time to think, he will realise the insult done him was by accident. Perhaps in his mercy he will only demand apologies.”
“You’ve left half of the story out, and what you’ve included makes little sense without it,” the beggar pointed out. He patted the street beside him with a hand gnarled and calloused as a foot. “Have a seat and tell us the whole story.”
So Zayd did. Halfway through, a tea seller joined them, and everyone bought sweet, refreshing tea poured through stalks of mint. The baker ducked back to his stall to bring out a plate of cheese börek, the smell of which drew his neighbour the fishmonger to flip a cover over his own stall and take a moment’s rest in the shade to hear the news.
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